Answer: The Marxist mechanism that disconnects facts from conclusions to make war on our minds.

Much of the Trump Effect today is due to Donald Trump's rejection of what we all know and instantly recognize as "PC." But what is political correctness? Where does it come from? The origins and seeding of "PC" into American culture are topics of much scrutiny in American Betrayal. Here is one excerpt that I just read for the upcoming audiobook.

Under discussion is the process by which what was at one time common knowledge, or a fact-based conclusion -- for example, that the Communist Party USA was controlled and directed by Moscow -- could be un-learned by society at large.

Their frustration is palpable. All those sparkling, witty gambits by conservative pundits to denigrate Trump supporters -- as, for example, when National Review's Kevin Williamson wrote in a column that Trump supporters are "engaged in the political version of masturbation: sterile, fruitless self-indulgence" -- has earned little more than approbation from their own kind -- as when Commentary's Noah Rothman, for example, responded with equally sparkling wit: "Man. This piece. @KevinNR grabs Trump supporters by the ... well, you know."

Do they ever. But no matter how many conservative websites take the dirty thang forward -- "Donald Trump Is Porn for Nativists" The Federalist recently declared -- Trump's support continues to rise.

And that's what's so frustrating for these gentleman-pundits. Unable to reckon with Trump -- namely, with his unique ability to bring the crisis of the immigration invasion to national attention, giving last-ditch hope to many that he is a man who will actually do something about it -- their strangely, sexually framed hostility has proved to be (borrowing from their thesaurus) impotent.

My thoughts -- more apostasy from brave new world -- on the anticipated graduation of two female Army Rangers tomorrow are encapsulated in the column below. I wrote it in January 2013 in response to the decree by SecDef Pannetta and JCC Dempsey that turned combat into an "opportunity" for women, making tomorrow's ceremony, and others like it, inevitable.

"When Women Fight, Civilization Loses"

And so it came, the coup de grace. The final “barrier” to “opportunities” for women in combat is no more. With a stroke of their pens, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin E. Dempsey decreed that no battlefield mission or military role is off-limits to the female sex. The defense secretary and the general thus liberated mothers, daughters, sisters and wives to kill and be killed in the infantry, commando raids, even in Obama administration “overseas contingency operations.” In so doing, they also slashed away at that last institutional protection for the space that separates men and women, where civilization once grew.

The derangement over Donald Trump and his supporters is nowhere more evident than in the rank, rancorous reactions by anti-Trump journalists, pundits and political strategists on the Right. It's one thing for the Washington Post to run pictures of Trump grimacing under the headline, "Trump Runs for the Spite House," etc., but the intensity -- the crudity -- of the voices of brand-name conservatism is nowhere exceeded.

Cindy Simpson has collected a recent sample of the visceral, even pornographically-themed hostility to Trump and his supporters erupting amid the punditry on the Right. Even when some of these wordsmiths reach for the bon mot, it comes out graffiti. Simpson sees the trend as off-putting not only to Trump supporters but also to those seeking a "Big Tent" more generally. After...

The media are trying to eject Donald Trump & his Border Wall from the presidential primaries before a single voter gets the chance to pull a lever.

And they say Donald Trump is a disgrace.

Some thoughts while trying to keep pace.

1. "News" organizations should not run presidential debates.

As Michael Savage noted on his radio show, the first GOP debate this week was co-sponsored by Fox News and Facebook. Fox News is owned by pro-amnesty Rupert Murdoch and Facebook is owned by pro-amnesty-Mark Zuckerberg.

No wonder the fix seemed to be in. No wonder the Fox-Facebook debate demonstrated there is no mythological "balance" to be found between "conservative" and "mainstream" media; nor, I would add, is baiting candidates the best use of the public airwaves to inform the electorate. That said, they have to get used to it -- and so should we, and *even* from Fox.

Robert Conquest has died at age 98. He was a gigantic hero of truth and the voiceless.

On a professional note that is also personal, Robert Conquest's tremendous body of work -- and, I would add, the consternation and controversy his work engendered amid the "intelligentsia" -- has been and will remain a guiding inspiration.

In many ways, American Betrayal is itself a paean to Conquest.

Some relevant passages from the book follow.

p. 94

British historian Robert Conquest is one such magnificent exception. Conquest’s special branch of Soviet history might well be called Soviet exterminationism—a new “ism,” perhaps, but one that fittingly encapsulates the history of mass murder Conquest has immersed himself in, cataloging and analyzing the boggling scale of murder and tragedy deliberately wrought by the Communist regime in Russia. His macabre exercise began, most notably, with his history of Stalin’s purges of the 1930s, The Great Terror. The book came out in 1968, a time when no other historians were even acknowledging the existence of this hulking wound of a subject, a time when, amazingly, Joseph E. Davies’s twenty-seven-year-old pro-Stalin tract, Mission to Moscow, was still the first and last word on the subject. Noting the Conquest book’s uniqueness in 1968, Andrew and Mitrokhin called it “a sign of the difficulty encountered by many Western historians in interpreting the Terror” (emphasis added).45 When Conquest finally marshaled the available research and put a number on the horror— twenty million killed during the Stalin period—it was as though the historian had additionally become a cold-case criminologist and, further, by implication, a hanging judge. As crunched by columnist Joseph Alsop, commenting in 1970 on a particularly callous review of the Conquest book and its themes, those twenty million souls killed by the regime represented one-eighth of the entire Russian population “of that period, in peacetime and without provoking a whisper of protest.”46

As we approach the 70th anniversary of the atomic age, inaugurated in a radioactive blast at Hiroshima, know that the information below, which will prove shocking to some, has previously been collected, developed, verified in both newspapers and research tomes. It has been reported by time-tested journalists and noted historians. It has been confirmed and declared by top military figures and world famous political leaders. It is information that belongs to the American people, but it is information that is virtually lost to us, "disappeared" from what is well-described as our "court history," written not to shed light on events but to burnish the ideologies that be. Yes, more American betrayal.

Today's subject, then, is not only the two atomic bombs that the US dropped first on Hiroshima and then on Nagasaki, but also the fairy tales we tell each other about them.

Last-of-the-Mohicans-style, the New York Times remains synonomous with being the so-called paper of record. "All the news that's fit to print," according to its avowedly judgemental motto. At this precarious point in its history, however, any brand-sense of selection or discernment is purely a matter of vaporous pretentiousness.

Take today's "Arts and Leisure" section. The title promises arts and leisure, but, of course, it showcases fare once relegated to "pulp magazines" or even wrapped in a paper bag.

What we are looking at (above) is (1) Blood and gore lede: " `Fear the Walking Dead,' " a spinoff of `The Walking Dead' on AMC, goes back to the early days of the zombie plague."

Excerpt: "The two shows fit under the same mythological umbrella created by Mr....

I don't know what came over Chris Matthews, putting the DNC's Debbie Wasserman-Schultz on the spot like that, calling on her to explain the difference between a Democrat and a Socialist.

What was the poor "chair" supposed to say? One party believes in free enterprise and limited government and other doesn't? Such a lie (no problem!) would "alienate the base." Admitting that both creeds are identical in their drive to "redistribute the wealth" -- Marx 101 -- would blow the smiley-face off the Democrat brand.

Then again, what if the DNC honcho-ess had decided to say something like: Well, Chris, maybe it's time to recognize the outmodedness of the "Democrat" label. We were, after all, the party of...